cardinality

Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word cardinality. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word cardinality, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say cardinality in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word cardinality you have here. The definition of the word cardinality will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition ofcardinality, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.

English

English Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia

Etymology

From cardinal +‎ -ity.

Pronunciation

  • Audio (US):(file)

Noun

cardinality (countable and uncountable, plural cardinalities)

  1. (set theory, of a set) The number of elements a given set contains.
    Synonym: power
    The empty set has a cardinality of zero.
    • 2005, Johan de Jong, “Set Theory”, in The Stacks Project, retrieved 2018-2-26:
      The cardinality of a set A is the least ordinal α such that there exists a bijection between A and α. We sometimes use the notation to indicate this.
    • 2006, Michael Smithson, Jay Verkuilen, Fuzzy Set Theory: Applications in the Social Sciences, SAGE Publications, page 37:
      For fuzzy sets, the concept of set size or cardinality is both richer and more problematic than it is for crisp sets. It is richer because, as we shall see, we may use more than one kind of cardinality.
    • 2012, Adolf Grünbaum, Robert S. Cohen, Marx W. Wartofsky, Philosophical Problems of Space and Time, 2nd edition, Springer, page 487:
      Clearly, in this example, the sensitivity to the cardinalities takes the weaker form of a single-valued function from the measure to the cardinality rather than the stronger form of a function from the cardinality to the measure.
  2. (type theory) The number of terms that can inhabit a type; the possible values of a type.
    • 2021, Martin Odersky et al., chapter 19, in Programming in Scala, 5th edition, Artima, →ISBN:
      For many types, such as String, the set of possible values is unlimited. Such types have an infinite cardinality.
  3. (data modeling, databases) The property of a relationship between a database table and another one, specifying whether it is one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, or many-to-many.
  4. (religion) The status of being cardinalitial

Usage notes

(set theory): The cardinality of an infinite set is an infinite cardinal number. The smallest such number, called aleph-null and denoted ℵ₀, describes the natural numbers; the next is aleph-one. The cardinality of the real numbers is greater than aleph-null, though whether it is equal to aleph-one is the subject of the continuum hypothesis.

Translations

See also

Further reading